Tunisia’s Government Falls, Arab Democracy Is Born

Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) -- If you blinked, you missed it, but
the democratically elected Islamist government of an Arab
country just promised to resign peacefully, with no threat of a
coup d’etat in sight.

Tunisia is still a long way from political stability. Yet
once again, the nation that started the Arab Spring is showing
the rest of the region how it’s supposed to be done. Reasonable
people facing deep disagreements are negotiating and power-sharing their way to the Holy Grail of legitimate constitutional
democracy.

Start with the deal. Ennahda, the Islamic democratic party
that formed a government after Tunisia’s free elections in 2011,
didn’t agree to step down for nothing. In exchange for agreeing
to resign in favor of a caretaker government of nonpartisan
technocrats, Ennahda got the opposition to agree to ratify a
draft constitution that has been painstakingly drafted and
debated over the last year and a half.

Under the rules of the road, adopted after the old regime
fell in January 2011, the constituent assembly can approve the
constitution if two-thirds of its members vote in favor. That
structure put a premium on consensus, the political value most
valued by Tunisian political culture. It also put Ennahda in a
tough position during the drafting process: Its slight coalition
majority in the assembly gave it almost no leverage, because it
needed lots of opposition votes to get to two-thirds. The only
alternative was to go to the public, which might have approved
the constitution by a bare majority. But that would have
violated the goal of consensus, and Ennahda consistently refused
to treat it as an option.

Egypt’s Errors

A culture of consensus is usually a curse for an elected
majority -- but in Tunisia, it’s turned into a blessing. Instead
of distrusting the opposition and trying to ram through its
proposals, the way the Muslim Brotherhood tried to in Egypt, the
Tunisian Islamic democrats have compromised from the start.
Former Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi, convinced (correctly,
to be sure) that the Deep State wanted him out, failed utterly
to include independent secularists in his government. He became
so focused on the fact that a majority of the public had elected
him that he forgot that it hadn’t taken a majority to bring down
his predecessor, the dictator Hosni Mubarak -- just the potent
combination of millions in the streets and a restive Army.
Attempting to govern without broad-based support, he found
himself hamstrung, thwarted and, eventually, alone.

In Tunisia, the government has been very attuned to the
precariousness of its mandate. When secularists opposed putting
Shariah into the constitution, Ennahda fumed -- then agreed.
When a prominent secularist politician was assassinated in
February 2012, Ennahda sought to distance itself from the
radicals who carried it out -- but its own prime minister
resigned in a show of contrition for failing to prevent it.

More recently, after the assassination of a second
secularist leader in July, the Islamic democrats faced their
deepest challenge yet. Secular opponents were buoyed by outrage
at the killing and widespread frustration with an economy that
still hasn’t turned around. Sensing that the tide was turning,
the opposition essentially decided to block the constitution.

In crisis, Ennahda made an extraordinary decision: It would
put the secular constitution it had helped draft ahead of its
party interests. A starker contrast to Morsi’s Muslim
Brotherhood could hardly be imagined. Where Morsi forced a
hastily drafted, highly religious constitution through a badly
fractured assembly, only to see himself ousted, Ennahda put
principle first. Offering to resign not only staked the moral
high ground, but also foreclosed any threat of removal by force.
There’s no point in plotting a coup against a government willing
to step down of its own accord.

Electoral Test

The obvious gamble Ennahda is taking might be imaginable in
other regions: The government is effectively calling for new
elections in a few months and hoping that the public respects
its success in getting a constitution through and its modesty in
putting itself up to the electoral test. But this is the Arab
world we’re talking about. When was the last time power was
transferred peacefully in a sovereign Arab state through free
and fair elections? That would be, uh … oh yeah: never.

Ennahda is staking everything on the hope that Tunisia is
going to become the first Arab democracy worthy of the label.
Will the gamble pay off? If it does, the reason will be
precisely the Tunisian norm of consensus and Ennahda’s
realization that it must respect it.

In new democracies, it can be hard to avoid the temptation
to mistake an electoral majority for the capacity to rule. But
majorities don’t make democracy work. Alternating governments
do. The secret sauce of democracy is no secret at all. The
opposition must believe that it will someday have a chance to
govern, and the majority must have the same expectation. Then,
with luck, self-interest will prevail, and the majority of the
moment will treat the opposition with respect in the hope and
expectation of receiving the same treatment when it goes out of
power.

By compromising on a constitutional draft and offering to
resign, Tunisia’s moderate Islamists have done their part. What
remains now is for the secularists to do the same, and not to
repress Ennahda when they eventually get the chance. Fingers
crossed.

(Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard University and
the author of “Cool War: The Future of Global Competition,” is
a Bloomberg View columnist. Follow him on Twitter at
@NoahRFeldman.)